The new Statistics system was designed with three goals in mind: 1. Provide simple and powerful statistical tools, 2. Clarify statistical terms and improve accuracy, and 3. Reward podcasters in our ranking system who publish top-notch content on a regular basis and generate audience engagement. While some statistical measures may have dropped for some people, which is understandably disappointing, we feel that delivering accurate and understandable statistics is better for everyone. Here are a few of the most frequently asked questions about changes from the old Statistics product:

What changed with the new ranking system?
The old ranking formula was based on three factors: downloads, visitors, and rss feed views. This tended to favor those podcasts that had been around the longest, accumulating iTunes subscribers over time, whether or not they posted fresh content with any regularity. The new system is based on a broader set of factors: plays, downloads, visits, follows, comments, playlists, likes and embeds. Not all of these factors have equal weight, but they do all factor in. We felt this was better representation of popularity and audience engagement than the old formula, and gives newcomers with high-quality content a better chance to climb the charts. It's a reflection of day-to-day popularity, not long-term accrual of subscribers.

Some podcasts that benefited from the old formula have seen their rank drop, but a high download count is still beneficial.

What happened to Subscribers?
Some regular PodOmatic customers might notice that the statistic called "Subscribers" is no longer prominent. In the old system, the Subscribers statistic was counted by adding up the daily RSS feed views from unique IP addresses, not the number of individuals who actually subscribe to a podcast via iTunes. This led to quite a bit of confusion because the number would vary wildly from day to day, there was no way to tell if people un-subscribed, and the number that that method generated was much higher than the actual number of people who subscribed using iTunes. We decided it was better give our customers accurate and straightforward data and do away with "Subscribers". Still interested in finding out where you stand on unique RSS feed views? Click the "Unique RSS feed views" link in the lower left corner of the Overview tab in PRO Statistics.

My plays went down. What happened?
In the old system, a play was counted whether someone listened to a half second or a half hour of your episode. In the new system, a play is counted if someone listens to at least 10% of your episode. While this is a more fair approach, it has caused play counts to drop for some people.

My downloads went down. What happened?
In the old system, downloads included both downloads and plays. In the new system, downloads are just downloads, and plays are counted separately. Additionally, we no longer count concurrent downloads from download accelerators; broken accelerators would grab one byte here and one byte there, leading to the appearance that multiple downloads were happening concurrently, when in fact it was only one.

What happened to the old Yahoo map with the orange flags?
The old map was good for its time, but it had some major problems which were not obvious: 1. It could put a maximum of 100 flags on the map, 2. It displayed an confusing statistic: The number of downloads coming from the people who downloaded the greatest number of episodes, and 3. It did not show city names. The new map can show an unlimited amount of data for any statistical measure, and you can zoom in to the city level on click. One request we've gotten is to map data on a per-epsisode basis, and we're evaluating this for a future release.

How do I get statistics for individual episodes?
Click the episodes tab, then select the date range and the statistic you're interested in. If the statistic for an episode is 0, it will not display in the list of episodes.